Viewing customer context in a ticket

This article describes how to view customer context in a ticket, including additional user profiles and events from applications other than Zendesk. It also describes how to view customer context in the Zendesk Agent Workspace.

About customer context

To provide better, faster, and more personalized responses to customers, you can view customer context in a ticket. By default, customer context includes:

An essentials card with details about the ticket requester, including contact information, time zone, and language.

An interaction history with a list of recent tickets submitted by the requester (or other related events). You can use this to better understand what the requester needed help with recently.

Additionally, customer context can include:

In the Zendesk Agent Workspace, customer context also includes a chat visitor path with a list of websites a chat requester has visited.

If enabled by your administrator, customer context can include additional user profiles and interaction history (events) from applications other than Zendesk.

Viewing and editing customer context

When you’re working on a ticket, you can view customer context to get more information about the ticket requester.

To view customer context

In a ticket, click the customer context tab () on the upper-left side of the ticket properties panel.

Note: Tickets open with ticket properties showing, unless customer context is set as the default.

You can add notes () to the essentials card or click the edit icon () to update the requester's profile.

When you add notes, the information becomes part of the requester's profile. They aren't just associated with the ticket.

Hover over the title of any ticket in the interaction history to see a preview, or click the ticket title to open the ticket.

Archived tickets are excluded from the interaction history. For information about how to view archived tickets, see About ticket archiving.

Viewing additional profiles and events in customer context

When enabled by an administrator, customer context for a ticket requester can include additional user profiles and events for third-party applications that are integrated with Zendesk.

Switching between profiles

Depending on which applications your account supports, your customers may have more than one user profile. For example, your customer may have a Shopify user profile in addition to their Zendesk user profile. To help you resolve customer issues, it can be useful for you to see each profile.

Note: The third-party user profiles you see in customer context are typically not the complete user profile from an application. Instead, the profiles show only what application developers choose to present to Zendesk.

To switch between profiles

In a ticket, click the customer context tab () on the upper-left side of the ticket properties panel.

Click the Profiles menu icon () next to the user’s name and select the profile you want to view.

If there are more than 10 fields in the profile, you can click View all at the bottom of the list to see a full description. Click View less to collapse the list.

Filtering interactions (user events)

In addition to multiple user profiles, your customers may have an interaction history for more than one application. For example, your customer’s interaction history may have Shopify user events in addition to Zendesk user events. To help you resolve customer issues, it can be useful for you to filter user events by application or event type.

To filter events

In a ticket, click the customer context tab () on the upper-left side of the ticket properties panel.

Open Interactions to view a list of events.

By default all user events appear in the interaction history.

To filter the events, click the filter icon ().

Select the events you want to view.

You can view:

All events for all applications

All events for a specific application

A specific type of event for an application

To clear the filter, click the refresh icon ().

Viewing customer context in the Zendesk Agent workspace

If your administrator has enabled the Zendesk Agent Workspace, you can toggle between the User (customer context) panel and the Apps panel in the ticket sidebar.

In addition to user profiles and interactions, customer context in the Zendesk Agent Workspace also includes a chat visitor path. The visitor path shows the path of a requester during a LIVE chat.

To view the visitor path during a live chat

In a ticket, click the User (customer context) panel on the right side of the ticket.

Click the down arrow (v) to expand the Chat visitor path.

The visitor path shows a list of websites the requester has viewed, including the website the requester is currently viewing. This path gives agents a better understanding of their customer's journey throughout their products.

Click any link in the visitor path to see pages the user has visited.

If there are more than 10 events in the list, you can click the View all link at the bottom of the visitor path to see an expanded list, with a maximum of 20 events.

Using shortcuts to view customer context

You can use the following keyboard shortcuts to toggle between the ticket properties panel and the customer context panel.

Would it be possible to integrate the "Patfinder app" in the interaction history part? That would be nice, so we can see wich articles the end-user is searching on our helpcenter, right from the interaction History.

I can click a link in the notes field in the user profile page, but I cannot click the same link the Customer Context Tab. Please add that functionality and the ability to pick what fields show up in the CCT.

Thanks for your feedback, everyone! We've had to slow the rollout of the interaction history for some accounts. For these accounts, the essentials card should be available now with the full rollout of the interaction history happening over the coming days. I'll keep this thread updated with any changes.

Nice feature, love how the interface makes it seamless to move between ticket and user data.

Some feedback and questions:

For some reason, our custom user fields aren't appearing? These contain crucial data we pull via web service to help our agents, and we'd like to have them displayed in the essentials card.

Even better, I'd like the option to select which user fields appear to the agent. For example, the essentials section displays user tags, which is something that confuses our agents. (Is there a way to hide this?).

Feature request (1): ability to display custom user fields w/ visibility options (show always or only if has value) + add quick-copy click button to all that are text/regex.

Feature request (2): something like contextual workspaces but for the user profile fields.

Thanks in advance, also @Jenn for the update regarding interaction history rollout.

Update on the rollout of the interaction history: It has now been rolled out to all customers and ticket history should begin populate beneath the essentials card. As always, thanks for your patience and continued feedback!

Can you please clarify how the hover is supposed to work on the tickets which appear there? I am seeing only a few comments on tickets where there are >1 comments. The hover window has a scroll bar but it is not enabled. Is this a bug?